The United States seems obsessed with cruising these days. Senator Larry Craig and Representative Bob Allen's respective arrests this year have catapulted public sex into the public eye. What a perfect time, then, for Deseret News to feature Pride Counseling's Healthy Self-Expressions program.
Sponsored in part by the Salt Lake County Criminal Justice Services, this five-week course educates men on the dangers and implications of cruising. As we've already seen, many cruisers identify as straight, yet continually find themselves drawn to anonymous homosexual encounters: a confusing internal conflict, to say the least. Pride Counseling's Jerrie Buie explains:
There are so many layers to this issues. It really goes beyond a bunch of men looking for sex. People in this kind of culture really struggle with a sense of orientation.
Please tell us he's making a bad pun…
While such counseling sounds good in theory - and also helps the men shed potential criminal charges - we can't help but equate Buie's program and controversial reparative therapy. Consider Buie's proud proclamation:
We've been transitioning people out of this behavior. It is a permanent change in their behavior, and that's the systematic win. Just because you have an attraction to men doesn't mean you have to be a slave to those attractions. As a therapist I try to encourage people to be honest with themselves.
Buie further explains himself in this 2003 interview:
I try to put in perspective that, for whatever reason, homosexuality gets defined as purely a sexual thing. Socially, that's where the emphasis is. What I try to do is, if you will, desexualize what it means to be gay. What I ask people . . . is 'What are your values? What is your sense of who you are?'"
We're a bit torn on this one, readers and would love to hear your thoughts. It's worth noting, we think, that many of the program's participants are Mormon.
I've spoken with many people involved in the program when I lived in Salt Lake, it's much more gay-positive than this story in the Deseret News makes it sound (and Jerrie Buie certainly is). I fault the DN–an LDS owned paper that rarely hides its agenda–for selecting quotes that reinforce the idea of sexual orientation as a choice. My understanding is that the program has actually helped a lot of men come out of the closet.
I used to work with the Utah AIDS Foundation and as such partnered with many of the people who created the "Healthy Self Expressions" program. This is a gay-positive program. Jerry Buie is himself gay.
They are transitioning people out of anonymous sex in parks, not out of homosexuality.
I'll trust you two that it's a good program. Still, I'd point out that cruising isn't always destructive. I went through a period where I cruised the parks a lot, and initially it was incredibly liberating. Later, yeah, it started to feel like an addiction & it took awhile for me to break the habit. In the beginning, though, it really was all about sex. Nothing to do with self-esteem, nothing to do with a struggle for orientation. It was just: damn this is easy & I don't even have to spend hours in a smoky bar to get laid!